


where in the world is carmen sandiego

by sarsaparillia



Series: thunderbird and whale [3]
Category: Oxenfree
Genre: F/M, dubious substance abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-03
Updated: 2017-12-10
Packaged: 2018-11-22 18:22:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 14,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11385789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarsaparillia/pseuds/sarsaparillia
Summary: Jonas, stumbling after Alex.





	1. it's a hollywood summer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> do you know how hard it was not to title this fic JONAS PINES: THE MOVIE it was _so hard_

—

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[ _i sorta hoped you'd stick around_ ]

—

Jonas falls in love with Alex like a natural disaster.

Jonas falls in love with Alex fast and furious and helpless. He falls in love with her like lightning striking ground; a spark, a crash, an impossible sudden flood of knowing. He falls in love with her fast and hard and life-changing, and there's no going back to what he was before. He falls in love with her like jumping over a waterfall, like jumping over a gorge, like jumping and crashing and skinning his knees. He falls in love with her like cherry soda. He falls in love with her like salt.

Jonas doesn't  _tell_  Alex that he's fallen in love with her, of course.

Because the thing about Alex is that she's sort of fucked up, and she's not exactly the type of person to appreciate some guy staring at her wide-eyed and punch-drunk, which is basically all that Jonas wants to do. Alex is sort of fucked up, but she's magic; not every girl can talk to ghosts, or get lost in graveyards, or wait in the silver morning silence with a crossroads in her eyes. Alex is sort of fucked up, period.

But no one else can do a lot of the things she does, easy as breathing.

( _You don't meet a girl like that every dynasty_ , a voice hoots in the back of Jonas' head. It sounds like Ren when he's had three too many brownies and just wants to talk about the way light shines off of Nona's hair. Sometimes Jonas can't believe that these are his friends. Jesus, Ren.)

And so, it's like this:

Jonas drives Alex out to the ocean in the middle of the night, and then drives her home again, hands steady on the steering wheel. He likes to drive, road passing away beneath the tires, just like he likes to roll down the windows and listen to the rush of air gush in—it's the only music he can stand, anymore—nightmare cold.

She shivers in the passenger seat, orange sunglow slicking off her hair.

"I can close the window, Als," Jonas says, quietly, on the way back. The evening stretches out ahead of them like the road, ribbons of silver asphalt cut through with twilight sunglow, indigo-edged gold. They've lost more than a day to trying to figure themselves out, so what's one more? Saltwater burns the infection out, after all, stinging at the cracks in lips and knuckles and souls, and it's good. Clean.

Alex makes a tiny sound in the back of her throat, shakes her head. She's got her brother's jacket jammed under her neck for a pillow, a bright red shout. Jonas swallows. Red doesn't have great connotations.

"Nnhn, it's okay," Alex says. She lolls her head to look at him, raises a skeptical eyebrow. "Do you  _wanna_  close the window?"

"Nah," Jonas says, because he doesn't. There's something about cold nighttime air that settles his brain. But it's not about what he wants and it never has been; he's along for the whatever ride she's taking, even if it's only to be the chauffeur.

(The ghosts picked Alex. Jonas picked Alex, too.)

"You're kinda weird, y'know that, right?"

"You're sitting in my truck, Als, I don't think you get to talk," Jonas says mildly. He doesn't look at her; his eyes are on the road, hand loose around the stick-shift. It trembles back and forth, because it's an old truck. His mom's.

"I never said that I  _wasn't_  weird," Alex stresses, with this tiny imperious toss of her head, a motion as unconscious as it is natural. She doesn't know she does it, and somehow that only makes it worse. "Just that, you know,  _you are too_."

"Yeah, well, who isn't weird," he says. Glancing her over is old habit now, taking stock of the way she's curled in on herself. On a good day, she lets herself go loose, relaxing in increments. On a bad day, well—

Jonas doesn't begrudge Alex a bad day or two.

"That's true, I guess," she murmurs, faintly. Something's gone adrift in her voice, a ship lost on ocean waves, fading into a storm. There are no edges that Jonas wouldn't follow her over, no gorge, no cliff, no island. "We are pretty weird, though. All of us."

"Yeah," he says. "We are."

Weird or not, it makes no difference. Jonas lets it lie because he's good at that, now—you break a kid's face once and it never leaves you alone. The Kanaloa's ghosts don't haunt Jonas the way they haunt Alex, and thank Jesus for that; he's got enough problems without a hundred odd dead people whispering over his shoulder every hour of the day. Because if there's one thing he knows, it's that there can't be two crazy people in a relationship. It doesn't matter what kind of relationship, either; friendship or family or burning bitter love, a relationship is a relationship is a relationship. And in a relationship, someone has to be stable. Someone has to hold things together.

Jonas is cool being the stable one.

(He's mostly figured out how to keep his shit together.)

And that's why he's fine to wait out the quiet. The Washington sunset sinks into the horizon, the dark dreamy bloom of full night just a few minutes away; it's nightmares on wax, or breaking glass, or bars across a school window.

The little hauntings.

In the silence, Alex reaches across the space between them.

Links their fingers.

—

"Mom and Dad are fighting again."

"Again? For real?"

"Yeah," Alex says. She doesn't look at him, too concentrated on the sky sailing cloudless above them. It's late July, one of those golden days that drips into every other golden day, and Jonas couldn't tell you what time it was if his life depended on it. A bug buzzes. "Mike's staying here, but now Mom's all,  _what about you, Alex, what are_ you _going to do? You should be more like Michael, he's got himself together_ , and then Dad gets involved because he, like, gets it? Somehow? That I'm not—cut out for it, school or whatever. I don't—" she stops abruptly, chewing on the words, swallowing hard, "—I don't think I can."

 _It would be too loud_ , she doesn't say.  _Too much_.

(Doesn't need to say.)

"Yeah," Jonas says, exhales smoke. "I don't blame you."

"Gimme that," Alex says, sitting up and reaching over to pluck the cigarette from his fingers. "You're literally killing yourself, I feel bad for your lungs."

"And you aren't? Killing yourself, that is," Jonas raises an eyebrow at her, but doesn't bother to try to steal it back. It'll just end in burns and bad karma, and no one wants that. He thinks about his mom. Burns and bad karma. It's all the same.

"Wow, Jonas, that sure was a thing you just said," Alex says, face scrunched up, eyes gone narrow, her freckles a constellation that bunches and moves, inverse stars winking in and out. "That was very much a thing you just said."

He hates that he still thinks she's pretty. "…Too close to home?"

"Yeah, a little," and she grinds the cigarette out. "I'm just—I don't even know. Why does it even matter if I go to school or not? Why do I have to decide this right now, anyway? Who even  _cares_?"

"Capitalism," Jonas says.

"If you start singing soupcan jingles at me, I will kill you," Alex tells him evenly. "I will actually, legitimately murder you, and no one will ever know it was me."

"Everyone would know it was you, I don't hang out with anyone else."

"You hang out with Clarissa—which, don't even get me started, I still think that's weird—and Ren, too."

"Ren doesn't count," Jonas says, because Ren  _doesn't_  count. He's spent the last three days being  _excessively excited_  about Nona up and ditching school to focus on her ballet, in a way only Ren can be  _excessively excited_ ; he's about as threatening as a teacup. "And if Clarissa was going to murder anyone, it would be you."

Alex blinks at the sky, brown eyelashes kissing her brown skin and Jonas thinks that maybe he should go lie down. Except he kind of already is lying down. Her hair is everywhere, leaching dye into the ground and colouring the world up melancholy. Everything is so weird.

He wonders when  _weird_  became  _interesting_.

He wonders if Alex wonders the same thing.

"…Fair point," she says, eventually. "Hey, what about you?"

"Hm?"

"What are you gonna do now? Has your dad started the whole—" Alex makes a face that Jonas thinks is supposed to be her mom when there's dirt on the floor, but isn't anything like what her mom actually looks like when there's dirt on the floor. He shouldn't know that, though; he never got to live those lives.

"He's just glad I graduated, I think," Jonas says. He shrugs against the prickly grass. It bites into his skin like so many things do. "I mean—we didn't know if I'd be allowed."

"…God, that's so fucked up," Alex says. "That's so fucked up!"

"What?"

"After everything, it's like—it's like, that's still a thing! Graduating is still a thing! Even after ghosts, high school is still a thing! The world just keeps—keeps going, like none of it ever mattered, and I know that I'm not supposed to think about it anymore but like—what  _else_  are we supposed to do?! I didn't care about graduating, and I don't care about college! Is that wrong?"

"No," Jonas says, because it's not wrong.

(But it is why he keeps taking her driving at night. He doesn't tell her that. He doesn't tell her a lot of things. It's easier for her and harder for him, but Jonas can handle the hard things. He can. He has to.)

"I miss them," Alex says, at last, soft and weary and rubbing at her eyes. "I actually miss them. How fucked up is that?"

"Sounds pretty normal to me," Jonas says, slowly. He doesn't quite know the right words to tell her that everyone deals with trauma differently—at least she's not smoking in an ill-disguised attempt to conquer the disease that killed her mother, but self-awareness is for tools, and Jonas doesn't really want to get into it—so he slips his arm beneath her neck and shifts her close enough that he can smell her skin, salt and soap and something vaguely metallic. "Jesus, Als, stop  _fidgeting_ , I'm trying to impart life advice."

"Your life advice sucks," Alex informs him succinctly, but she goes where he directs.

They settle. Settle.

"It's gonna be okay," Jonas says.

"That's not life advice," Alex says.

"I never said it was."

"You kinda did, though, man," Alex sort of snickers into his collarbone, a hot puff of air that's more wind than sound, and it rolls over him like an ocean wave. "You, like, completely did."

"Yeah," Jonas sighs into her hair. The chemicals don't burn as much as they should, and yeah, yeah, she needs a dye job. He wants to kiss her like he wants another cigarette, soft mouth, ash on the tongue, blood on the lips. He wants to kiss her like dying. "I guess I did."

He doesn't kiss her.

(More's the pity.)

—

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 _tbc_.


	2. ice for the fever

—

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[ _but you were kinda spacin' out_ ]

—

Jonas settles down on the couch in the basement, and waits for Alex to come back.

It's always cold down here. Cement walls cut the summer heat, hard-packed earth and no natural light. The TV flickers on mute, and maybe they'll watch a movie but probably not. Jonas has spent hours and hours down here when Alex's parents are home, because Alex's parents don't really  _approve_.

Or at least her mother doesn't.

(Exactly the same way she doesn't really  _approve_  of Clarissa, come to think of it. Maybe there's something to it, after all.)

"Hey," Alex says, dropping down beside him, "Popcorn."

" _Cheese_  popcorn?"

"The best kind, obviously," she says, and kind of—hesitantly fits herself into his side. Hummingbird-stable, the beat of her pulse so fast in her throat, and Jonas just lets her because what else does he ever do, when it comes to Alex? What is he ever going to do that isn't something to make her comfortable? Jesus, he knows that he spends all his life following her around, and he's not even mad about it.

Jonas drapes his arm over her shoulder. "This okay?"

"Yeah," Alex says, muffling the words into his side. "Okay."

He laughs, sort of, and leaves his arm where it is.

But here is something that Jonas doesn't tell anyone: he knows that Alex doesn't sleep anymore.

It's not exactly a secret. Kind of hard to be, when there are a lot of days that Alex straight-up looks like the walking dead. And maybe everyone that he cares about knows, too, but there's a level of—distance, somehow, that Alex holds between herself and everyone else except for Jonas himself. It's in the way she goes wandering like she's trying to catch mist, head always a little cocked to the side because she's still listening to things that no one else can hear. The ghosts might not have soaked into Alex the way they soaked the rest of them, or maybe they actually soaked into Alex and no one else, but still, the end result is the same: she's not all the way into the world the way everyone else is.

Jonas understands. In the end, the only thing a person has left is empty palms.

"Hey, let me up," Jonas murmurs, a long time later.

"Mmnm?"

"I need a cigarette."

"Gross," Alex says, sleepy and slow, soft and fond. Her mouth pulls into a messy little smile, bleach-blonde-teal caught in her lips. "Don't come back smelling like smoke, I don't cuddle with death."

The universe hovers around her like a memory. Jonas thinks:  _I wish it were always this easy_.

And maybe Alex doesn't cuddle with death, but she's pretty good at cuddling with ghosts and the past and the unreal things in the world. She's talked about the blast door, and what was behind it, and drowning, even, sometimes, but Jonas just—isn't like that. He's not like that at all. He gets up from the couch, and he's not shaking, he's not.

But it would be so simple to just let things go for a while. Let Alex sleep. Let everyone sleep, ghosts and dead kids and even his mom. God, he just wants his mom to rest. He hopes she's at rest.

Still, on his way upstairs, Jonas checks over his shoulder to make sure.

Alex is out like a light.

He exhales.

Reaches for his smokes.

—

There's no such thing as loneliness, and neither is there such a thing as alone.

(At least not here.)

The kitchen is dark and quiet. Alex's parents are out tonight, but it seems like they're always out when they aren't yelling at each other. Jonas shoves his feet into his shoes, and is quietly glad that it's too warm for a jacket. A nicotine habit is worse when it's cold enough out that you can't flick a lighter; there is a reason his favourite season is summer.

It's nice to know that if he goes outside right now, his dick isn't going to freeze.

He's headed for the front, thinking about maybe going to check on his truck. It's a nice neighbourhood, but weird shit happens in nice neighbourhoods. He's just turning, and he only catches sight out it out of the corner of his eye.

There's a shadow on the back porch.

For a minute, Jonas  _thinks_  he sees—

But, no.

No, it's just Clarissa.

Tall and spindly, Michael's girlfriend is smoking out on the porch, arms folded together and shoulders loose. The acrid drift of cancerous smoke scents the air but ber cigarette's gone out, and she's chewing on the golden end with sharp teeth like a wild thing. Her nails leave crescents against her skin. She doesn't turn towards him, even when the door slides closed.

"Need a light?" Jonas asks her, even though she clearly doesn't. No one chews a cigarette like that if they want to smoke it.

"Buttfuck it," Clarissa says with a slow, curling smile. When Jonas raises his eyebrow at her, she just crooks one in return. "C'mon North Valley, don't tell me you've gone soft."

He wordlessly hands her his lighter. It's easier not to argue with Clarissa when she gets like this—she's in the mood for a fight. But held up for inspection, it's the same damn lighter he's had since before the world ended, clear green plastic over the slosh of lighter fluid. Jonas would say he's not sure why he keeps it, but he knows why he keeps it: everything in present-tense, and the lighter is still useful.

It's not that it's a reminder.

It's just that Jonas never learned to dwell on things, that's all.

Clarissa laughs a horrible hacking sound that somehow says everything her mouth doesn't. She's red all over. "Oh, wow, you  _have_  gone soft. What did Alex  _do_  to you?"

"Same thing Michael did to you," Jonas tells her mildly, without a trace of irony, because it's true. He remembers things, sometimes; the crackling old song his mother used to love, Alex in the pale blue twilight, the bright arterial flash of Clarissa's hair as she fell out a window. They're not good things, but they are  _something_ , and something is always better than nothing.

The lines of Clarissa's face all go painful soft and painful fond. "Being a stupid fucking idiot must be catching."

"Yeah," Jonas says. He offers her another cigarette. "Here."

"You know, I'm almost flattered," Clarissa says, and inhales over the spark of modern flint and tinder. Embers around the curl of her fingers, dying like stars, and Jonas thinks of Alex and her ghosts, the creepy-crawly nightmare things that slip inside a person and twist them all wrong. He thinks of Alex and her ghosts and the way she smiles, and Jesus, how does she still get up in the morning? How does she still—?

"—ey, earth to North Valley, come back here, please," she waves a hand in front of his face. "Wow, you were  _gone_ , weren't you. You want your lighter back, or no?"

"Give it."

"Ooh,  _someone's_  testy. Did Alex ditch you?"

Alex is still passed out on the couch in the basement. Jonas can still feel the heat of her cheek against his chest, the heavy weight of a body gone lax with sleep. Getting ditched is not even remotely the issue.

"Just give it back, Clarissa," Jonas says.

And she does.

Hands it over, just like that.

There used to be an edge of cruelty to her, and it's still there, sometimes, because Clarissa knows how to hurt. She says things without meaning them, but they're always exactly the right thing to take the breath out of a person's chest. Jonas watches the way she taps her nails against her cheek, the smoke dangling from her other hand. It's a tiny glow in the night. Cancer stick, killthroat, coffin nail. There are a lot of names for a cigarette's lung rot, but they all forget that at night, that little glow looks like salvation.

"Who's gone soft  _now_?" Jonas snarks at her.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Clarissa waves him off. "You're as bad as Nona. It's not cute."

"How  _is_  the three-legged puppy?"

"Okay, no. One, I am the only person who gets to call her that, she's  _my_  three-legged puppy," Clarissa says, eyes gone narrow, and there's that mean edge to her. Jonas would snicker, because it's never really going to go away. Clarissa's got biting wit for days. "And two, she's—good. She'll be back next week. She misses Ren or something, though why anyone would miss Ren is beyond me."

"You're lucky he's not here to hear you say that."

"Why? He's like five-two, I'm not scared of him."

"He would write a song about you," Jonas says. The sudden, vivid memory of Ren yodeling drunkenly at Michael's birthday party is visceral in both their minds. There are some things that stay gold, but this isn't one of them. Ren yodeling is the worst thing that has ever happened to anyone. "And then we'd all have to listen to it. He'd bring out his ukulele. He'd bring out  _Michael's_  ukulele."

"The horror," she says, deadpan. "Whatever am I going to do."

"Maybe not be terrible?"

"Oh, you're adorable, North Valley. You have  _so_  much to learn," Clarissa says, grinning with all of her teeth. "And you know what? I'm not in the mood to educate you, so we're done. Shoo, shoo."

"What—?"

"No, we're done," she cuts him off, flicking her fingers at him. It's a dismissal if Jonas has ever seen one, and he sort of blinks at her. Clarissa just shakes her head, red everywhere, and she's pretty the way a poisonous spider is, all long limbs, long fingers, long poison fangs in her mouth.

(Jonas is absolutely terrified of her.)

" _What_?" he asks again.

"You heard me. Go on, go find Alex, do something useful with your life," Clarissa says over her shoulder at him, elbows propped on the porch railing. The line of her shoulders has gone easy and loose again. In the evening air, everything about her has turned misty heather grey and eiderdown purple-soft, and when she kind of grins at him, there's no bite to it.

(He doesn't remember her falling. He doesn't remember the sound her bones make when they break. He doesn't remember her eyes lit up like lanterns during Chinese New Year. He doesn't remember anything at all.)

"Go easy on her, okay?" Clarissa says. She ashes her cigarette into the grass. "Alex drives me crazy, but she's still my boyfriend's little sister. I don't wanna have to kick your ass."

"You could try," Jonas tells her mildly, even though he has no idea what's going on.

"Don't test me," Clarissa says. "Oh, hey, you can tell Mike he can stop hovering at the door, I know he's there. He's useless at subtlety. If he wants to come and kiss me, he can."

"You heard her," Jonas calls, and the only reply is Michael's laughter, muted through the glass.

These people are crazy.

It is mind-boggling how much it feels like a family.

Jonas scrubs a hand through his hair, ducking out of Michael's way when he comes ambling outside. Alex's older brother—and Jesus, Jonas is never going to get away from it, from thinking about everyone in relation to who they are to Alex—kind of nods at him, and it's weird because if Jonas were Michael, he'd have probably punched himself by now.

Michael's a better person than most anyone else Jonas knows, though, so maybe not.

He curls his hand around his lighter, and slides the glass closed. Jonas knows, already, that he's going to go back downstairs, slip his arm beneath Alex's cheek, get uncomfortable so that she can get a few solid hours of sleep for once. He knows that he's going to wake up sometime tomorrow afternoon—because there's no light in the basement, never any light in the basement and what's a decent circadian rhythm without light—with a crick in his neck and an mouthful of Alex's hair, and a weird half-memory of his mother laughing  _sleep, who needs sleep, pssh, your mom needs sleep_ —

There's no time to dwell, Jonas tells himself. Not on the ghosts, not on North Valley, not on his mom. There is only here and now, and his knuckles are white around the basement doorknob.

He pulls it open.

And there she is, coming up the stairs.

(She's always meeting him in the middle.)

"Hey," Alex says. Her hands are stuffed in her pockets, and she's got Michael's jacket on. That can't mean good things—she only pulls it on when the dark cracks in the universe seep inside her soul—and Jonas just looks her over, quiet and careful and holding his voice like shattered glass in his mouth. Alex is prickly in the shoulders, head down, nails bitten to the quick. The darkness under her eyes smears into the roots, and Jesus, she looks haunted all over again. All he can think of is the shape of her mouth around the words  _I miss them, how fucked up is it that I miss them_?

"Hey," Jonas says. "What's up?"

"Nothing. Are you busy?"

He could say  _do I look busy_ , or  _your parents are gonna have a shitfit if I keep you out past curfew again_ , or  _you know me, busy, busy, busy_. He could tuck a smoke behind his ear, turn up his jacket collar, pull off some half-slick greaser-kid mojo; be the boy who broke a kid's face, be a warning sire, be what he is for other people, cautionary tale, pre-emptive arson, cigarette smoke on the breeze.

But this is Alex, and Jonas doesn't lie to Alex.

It's not like he's here for anyone but her, anyway.

So what Jonas says is, "Nah."

"…D'you wanna go for a walk?"

—

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 _tbc_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1: my headcanon clarissa is all about ridiculous nicknames and being hot messy garbage i love her  
> 2: i know this whole thing romanticizes smoking a lot but honestly? shit is gross. don't do it.


	3. black dreams

—

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[ _your old ghosts will find us again_ ]

—

Alex likes graveyards.

_They're quiet_ , she says, quiet like the dock where the Edwards Island ferry pulls in, quiet like an empty lighthouse, quiet like so few things are. And so that's where they go, even though Jonas' truck is right there, even though they're probably both going to get yelled at for being out past curfew, even though the streetlights have all gone flickering out.

They walk with tangled fingers.

"You wanna talk about it?" Jonas asks her. He stares down at the top of her head, and maybe he's trying to see into her thoughts, because this whole deal would be a whole lot less inscrutable if he could.

"Not here," Alex mutters, and her grip tightens around his fingers. The  _slap_  of rubber soled-sneaker against asphalt is so loud. "It's—not here."

"Alright," Jonas says easily, and follows her down.

There are liminal spaces in the world. Places where reality doesn't quite  _fit_ —god knows, they've spent enough time in them already, Jonas can call a place haunted when he sees a place haunted—and they're scattered across the world like a trail of crumbs leading into the ether. Rest stops, gas stations, gnarly rooted paths leading into the forest; they're fairy places, ghostly places, places where humanity gets the sense that they ought to keep their eyes forward and  _mind their own business_.

Graveyards tend not to be, though. Graveyards are just peaceful; Jonas is expecting a graveyard.

Instead, they go to Walgreens.

"Seriously, Als?  _Walgreens_?"

"Hey man, don't judge," Alex says. She reaches up to catch the tips of her bleached-out hair in her fingers, yellow like straw, and tugs on it to make her point. "It's open twenty-four hours, and you're the one who keeps saying I need a dye job."

"You  _do_  need a dye job."

"Good, then you shouldn't be complaining," and she grins at him, lips pulled back from her teeth like a particularly punkish goblin. Who even is she, honestly. "You coming?"

"Yeah, I guess," Jonas says, shaking his head, and follows her into over-airconditioned, fluorescent-lit, liminal hell.

Which, on the subject of liminal spaces:

There is no place in the  _universe_  quite as unreal as a Walgreens pharmacy at assfuck AM.

No, really. Jonas has seen some shit, and none of it comes  _close_  to how hair-raisingly  _not right_  a Walgreens at night is. It's in the blistering white lights, the long endless empty aisles, the way a person's skin seems to cling to their bones. The merchandise warps out until it's all just a smear of advertising colourpop and the artificial lingering of burning ozone. Alex's shadowed eyes are the only things alive in this wasteland, but she's comfortable here in a way she isn't comfortable anywhere else. She passes through the strangeness like she belongs to it.

Jonas knows that it's because she's not entirely here, either, but jesus, that doesn't make it any easier to swallow.

He lets her lead him past the mouthwash and the deodorant, the former glowing bromothymol blue poison spilled over the linoleum and the latter a million technicolour teeth in the gaping maw of the shelving units; past lines of violently pink razors, past smiling woman without pupils in the eyes printed on unidentifiable hand lotions, past torture devices flat and round and held together only by accident,  _past_ —

When Jonas comes back to himself, Alex is skimming the tips of her fingers along boxes of hair dye.

"Teal?" he asks her. It's only a little wry.

"I like teal," Alex says. "And orange is gross."

"You could do purple."

"What if I didn't, though."

"Pink?"

"The choices are teal or orange. Take your pick," Alex says, one eyebrow crooked and holding out the two boxes of dye. Ghost girl, changeling child, she's always going back to the start. Jonas tries to imagine her with orange hair.

"…Stick with teal," he says.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," and she puts the orange dye back, grabs a second bottle of the teal. Jonas watches the way she weighs them, one in each hand, something equally sad and fond tucked into the corners of her mouth. "Y'know, I didn't ever think I was ever gonna dye my hair again. I thought I was just gonna… let it grow out."

"Yeah?" Jonas says. And he knows that what he's about to ask is a stupid question, but he's going to ask it anyway. "So why are you, then?"

Alex is quiet for long minutes that stretch out sticky-sweet and rippling like salt-water taffy, strange and chewy on the tongue. When she finally looks up at him—looks up at him clear in the eye, the darkest nut brown framed by even darker lashes—she says, "You know why."

And yeah.

Yeah, Jonas  _does_  know why.

"Here," he says. "I'll take 'em."

"What, you're gonna pay?"

"Sure, if you want."

Alex looks up at him for another sticky-tack minute, and then she puts the boxes of dye in his hands. Her face pulls into a frown, a tiny furrow between her brows as she squints like she's got the golden sun in her eyes, and it's times like this that Jonas has to wonder what the world looks like to her. He has to wonder what she finds in the way he follows her, and it aches, it  _aches_. They linger in the harsh fluorescent light, the pair of them burning away into nothing but smoke and ash versions of themselves.

(A memory: standing over her just like this on the dock, shoulders hunched up around his ears, passing her a cigarette with knuckles bruised bloody and waiting for her to choke on it but she never  _does_ —)

"Sucker," Alex says, and grins.

"Jesus, Alex," Jonas says.

But he is, though.

He is.

—

And so: Alex likes graveyards.

"I don't think I'm cut out for, like, normal-people things," she says. The plastic bag swings from his arm, but they're not holding hands anymore. The nighttime is cool, bitingly fresh and indigo-blue, a violin decrescendo into softness. Jonas turns the collar of his jacket up against the wind, and tries to swallow the urge to put his arm around her.  _Not helpful, asshole, get it together, neither of you need that right now_.

"Like school?" he asks, instead.

"Yeah."

Jonas waits. Alex comes to things in her own time.

"It was a nightmare," she says. The darkness blooms in her face, shadow-shard, pensive. Jonas remembers what she looked like with red light pouring out of her, and feels kind of sick. "Earlier."

"I figured," he says. "You wanna—?"

Alex shrugs.

Most graveyards are alike. Most graveyards are quiet, peaceful places. Even at night, star-cut and netter over with spools of silver light, it's a soft sort of place. The dead here rest if not in peace, then at least in silence. And there's no one around, just little solar-powered lanterns that bob along the graveled path, pale blue will'o'wisp ghostlights that are hardly bright enough to see by. Jonas settles on the grass, wet with the beginnings of dew, and Alex—

She flops down on top of him.

_Uh_ ,  _okay, then_.

He'd been under the impression that maybe they weren't doing this anymore, or ever, or—something. Holding hands is one thing. Crawling into someone's lap is entirely another. But he thinks his mom would have liked Alex, so maybe that makes it okay. He likes Alex, too.

"Ow," Jonas says, mildly. "You tryna kill me?"

"Not right now," she says, dropping her head back against his collarbone and closing her eyes. "God, I'm so tired. Nightmares are the worst."

"Hey, don't fall asleep on me."

"You're not  _that_  comfortable, man, you're kinda bony," Alex says, but she shifts just enough that she's not in the perfect crook and cradle of his body anymore.

Jonas finds himself missing the weight. He'd move her back, but it would probably be counter-productive, and he knows that she needs to talk the nightmare out. Nightmares are like that. They sit behind the eyes and wait for a person to slip back into complacency, or at least into that uneasy place between asleep and dreaming, and then they roll in with rotting flesh and broken windows and gravestones carved with his mother's name.

(Yeah, Alex isn't the only one who's kinda fucked up.)

"So, normal-people things?" Jonas says, very quietly.

"It's stupid," Alex says.

"What  _isn't_  stupid?"

"Super, Jonas, that makes me feel so much better," and she digs her elbow into his side, but only very gently. "Look, it's—it wasn't—it wasn't a normal nightmare, okay? It was—I don't even know what it was. You won't get it.  _I_  don't even get it!"

"Try me," is all that Jonas says, voice very level.

"Nightmares are not supposed to be about getting married, okay?! They're supposed to be about, I dunno, drowning, or the heat death of the universe, or whatever! Scary things! Not, like, a happy ending. That's not normal, man, I know it's not!"

"Who were you getting married to?"

"That is  _so_  not the point?"

"Kinda think it is, though, Als—"

"It wasn't anyone," Alex says, exhaling all in a rush. "Just this, like, faceless blob in a suit? It was awful, it wasn't even a person, it was just a  _thing_ , but I was so scared and then I—and then I woke up."

"And then we went to Walgreens to get hair dye," says Jonas.

"And then we went to Walgreens to get hair dye," says Alex.

"And now we're here."

"And now we're here."

Jonas contemplates this for a minute, absently running his hands through Alex's hair. She kind of hums beneath it. The graveyard, the ghosts, the drowning that this girl has been doing—all things have an expiry date, even dreams, but when that expiry date is what everyone else thinks is a happy ending…

Jesus, it's no wonder she has nightmares about it.

"We should probably get home," Jonas tells her.

Alex blinks up at him, and her face scrunches up like an angry chipmunk. "Seriously? I tell you I have nightmares about, like, normal people life things, and you suddenly wanna go home?! This is not the droid we're looking for, try the next speeder, they might have the right answer!"

"Yeah, but hey now, think about it. What faceless blob is gonna wanna marry some girl with teal hair? It's a strategic pre-emptive strike, Als."

"Dick," Alex says. She's smiling into the dark. Jonas can feel it against his skin and his throat is suddenly so, so, so dry. "Will you help me dye it?"

"Yeah," Jonas croaks. Like there was ever another option for him. "Of course."

—

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_tbc_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> notes1: oh look a plotline, how novel  
> notes2: _islands_ — zola blood.


	4. hold it together 'til our friends are gone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **notes:** sorry this chapter isn't up to snuff, my dudes. i didn't want to write it much, either; summertime depression is the worst.  
>  **notes2:** _amused_ — h u n g e r.
> 
> also, casual warnings for **substance abuse, peer pressure,** and **idiots in love**.

—

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[ _smoking cigarettes 'til dawn_ ]

—

They're at another party.

(Why does it seem like they're always at another party?)

The steady  _thud_  of a bass trembles through the walls, the kind of sound that's so loud you don't hear so much as  _experience_. Every time he closes his mouth, Jonas can feel it shaking through his teeth. Lights in his eyes, smoke in the air like snowdrifts, Alex's mouth open around a laugh; the urge to fit her into the cracks and crevices of his own body hits so hard it nearly the knocks the wind out of him. Her hair shines beneath the dull lamp glow, freshly aquamarine and wild as storm-tossed ocean waves before she disappears, and he's left alone.

Jonas' fingers are still blue-green, and he's decided he's never going to help her dye her hair again.

Well, at least until she asks him to, again.

He pulls long and low from the lukewarm beer someone had shoved into his hand when he walked in the door, and  _i-spy-with-my-little-eye_  tries to find his friends.

It's a busy place. Michael's playing pong with a crowd of adoring twenty-somethings, the light glancing off his teeth and his arm around Clarissa's shoulders. Nona's there, too, because she and Ren are off this week, but who knows how long  _that's_  going to last. They're all there, mixed in with three dozen other people he doesn't know and it would be so easy to lose himself in it. Jonas could join them, let himself be jostled and hustled and swallowed into the loud warm cacophony of laughter and life. He could go meet people, maybe feel normal for a little while.

He could do that. He could.

But the idea of it is already abandoned, left in the dust and the debris like Jonas leaves all the things he leaves, tucked away in the empty corridors of his memory with light shows and his mother's grave and all the Edwards Islands' he doesn't remember.

He's never been the kind to dwell, Jonas.

And it's easy to weave his way through the crowd, tracking the fuchsia flash of Ren's shirt through gaps in bodies, sucking down beer like his life depends on it.

It's so hot, and he's so lost, but then the sea of people parts, and Jonas finds Alex because Jonas is always finding Alex.

And Alex—

Holy mother of sin, Alex is rolling a joint.

There's a practised air to the way she tamps the weed down into the grinder, twists,  _twists_ , pulls the metal apart and clinks it together to knock mossy green herb out from between barbed metal teeth. Her hands are soft-focus brown smudges in the low light, knobbly shadows over the pale pink wash of the paper. Half a gram of shake and then she's rolling it, tongue flicking out to lick along the adhesive and Jonas is—not entirely able to concentrate, anymore.

Well, uh,  _shit_.

"Jesus, Alex," Jonas sighs, and he doesn't know if it's scolding or resigned or what. It's something, though.

"Man, sit down and stop being judgey," Alex says, twisting off the ends of the blunt. Ren giggles.

"I'm not being judgey," Jonas says, and flops down beside her on the crusty brown couch. He winces when it crunches. Gross.

"You're being a little judgey," she says, conversational. Alex's eyes are big and dark as she holds the thing between her fingers, offers it the same way she offers sandwiches: so easy, so simple, like nothing matters anyway. "Hey, I need a light. You got one, garbage snowman?"

Jonas remembers reading something about girls with exorbitant large dark eyes and blue hair chain-smoking at parties, once. Something about asking her about her day, and how the strangest people can tell the most captivating stories.

But he knows what happened in Alex's day, and he knows very well all the captivating stories she could tell. Can tell. Does.

And she has him already, anyway. She doesn't need to open her mouth.

"Yeah, I, uh—shit, here, it's—" he scrubs into his pockets, half frantic and half clammy, all delirious. He wants her like he's never wanted anything else in his entire life. He wants her whole, entire, all her ghosts and all her problems and all her bright red coats! He wants her when she's smoking and when she's not and he wants her when she's a wreck and when she's trying to figure out how to put her back together and he wants her when—

He wants her always. It's easier to say that. Jonas wants Alex always.

"Oh," Alex says when he hands her the little green lighter, with it's lighter fluid still half full. She kind of just holds it for a long moment, and then one more, such a still thing in the swirl of light and smoke around them. "Oh."

"Yeah," Jonas says, and he doesn't tremble. "That work?"

"Yeah, I guess," she murmurs, shakes her head a little. "Here, hold on."

Alex puts the joint to her lips, flicks the lighter, breathes in.

She keeps the smoke in her lungs for a long time before she exhales with her eyes closed, and Jonas watches her face with a sick hungry thing in his chest, some awful combination of  _want_  and  _need_.

 _Please_  and  _you_  and  _always_. Jonas doesn't know the right words.

"You want?"

"Nnnghn, nah."

"C'mon, garbage snowman," Alex says, and then she's climbing into his lap, knees splayed on either side of his hips. A shock of lightning goes down his spine, the warm heavy weight of her the only right thing Jonas has suddenly ever known. "Smile for me?"

Jonas grins.

(He's so fucking weak.)

"Shotgun with me," she says.

"What?"

She's already bent away to get another lungful of smoke, and Jonas has no idea what's going on because she's right back in his space, all of her sharp edges pressed up against all of his. Suddenly nose to nose, and she's so close he can see the flecks of yellow-green in her eyes—

Alex exhales and Jonas inhales; they're mouth to mouth, not quite kissing but not quite  _not_  kissing either.

He thinks,  _breathe your smoke into my lungs_.

They pass the smoke back and forth until they've both breathed it a hundred times and it's not shotgun kissing anymore, it's just kissing, lips on lips, and she's small, Alex is, she's small but she's big as the whole universe. Jonas keeps his hands on her hips and lets her lead, smoke hazing out of her mouth and all around them, her hands in his hair pulling him down and down and down.

"Let's go," Alex says. Her pupils are wide as her face, mirror-black in the dim light.

"What?" Jonas slurs, chasing her. She sounds so far away. She sounds like she's in the back of his head and that's right, isn't it, because she's always been there, sunk in deep and real as the ghosts had ever been—

It's like ice cold water down his spine, that thought.

_Back the fuck up, man, that's not okay._

"Let's go," Alex says. "Outside, I wanna go outside, come with me outside, please?"

"Yeah," Jonas says. He needs to get out, suddenly, needs to be out in the cold clear air away from the smoke and the pounding of the bass. Needs to be away from the pull of Alex's skin, but that's probably not going to be a thing. Her fingers are hooked into the collar of his shirt and he doesn't have it in him to dislodge her. As though she's not everlasting, ever consuming, everything, everything. "Yeah, let's go."

—

Alex and Jonas stumble outside.

Hands twined, they slide past the cabal of smokers, the kids loitering on the steps, the easy offers to come back inside and light up. No one's surprised to see them go; they all know Jonas and Alex have been attached at the hip practically since the day North Valley moved in. It's been a year, but no one's getting any better.

The music haunts them in faint clinging threads, siren's song to reel them back. Smoke and song, rust and bone, crimson ghostlight flash. The past reaches for them, offers empty palms and the promise of oblivion, a deep-sea drowning for the late nights.

It's easy to ignore, though, because they've both died a hundred times.

There's a park down the road. This late, it's empty, and the jungle gym groans out of the murk like a fairy tale monster with iron teeth.

Jonas follows Alex down the hill into a grassy plain, and flops down to the ground next to her.

The stars spin out above them, a diamond spill across the sky that Jonas finds himself trying to frame into memory. Alex laughs without sound into his jaw, just a shaking of the shoulders, and he wonders about the golden-champagne texture of it, the way it seems to bubble through his bloodstream. The grass is wet with dew. He can feel every single blade.

"Hey, Als, you okay?" Jonas finds himself asking.

"Mmm, yeah, I think so," Alex says, shifting so that she's not mashed so uncomfortably into his side. She digs her elbow into the ground to prop herself up and then she's looking down at him through silver-shot starlight in the faintly cool night air. "Are  _you_  okay?"

"I'm always okay," he says, one side of his mouth picking up.

"Sure you are, garbage snowman," she says.

"My feeling," Jonas says, deadpan.

"Only the one," slips out of a crack in her like a whisper, a shuddery broken thing.

(God, only the one, always only the one. Jonas thinks his mom would like her, and that's maybe the worst thought he's ever had in his entire life.)

And they've had this conversation a lot of times. Jones knows that. He knows that they've had it more times than he knows, which should be counter-intuitive but it isn't because after everything, after everything and the end of the world, they're out here lying on the grass with the stars glinting above them and Alex is a heavy warm weight on his chest. It's cyclical, is the thing, but maybe not in a bad way.

"What am I gonna do with you," Jonas says. He doesn't run his hand through her hair, but he wants to.

"I dunno," she says. "Follow me to the ends of the earth?"

"Probably," he says, because it's true.

Alex is very quiet for a long moment, only the buzz of far-away firefly glow for flavour. She pushes up on her elbow again, and she frowns. Her lashes are so long. "Why are you like that?"

"Like what?"

"Like…  _that_ , that thing you do where you just, like,  _go_  with it. Why do you do that?"

 _Because someone should_ , Jonas doesn't say. He stares up at the sky, dizzy, far-away sick in the bones. He can feel Alex's eyes on his face.  _For you, someone should_.

"…You know what, never mind," she says. "I don't actually wanna know."

"Yeah, you probably don't," and if that's not the most confident lie Jonas has ever told, he doesn't know what is. Alex drops her cheek back down to his chest in the gathering night, a gentle warm press of skin against skin separated only by a thin layer of cloth. In the empty air, it's an anchor. It brings him back.

"Nerd," Alex murmurs like she's already dreaming. "Go to sleep."

They lay there for a while without saying anything, as her breathing goes shallow and slow. She's gone already, left to wander through the ghostfields and the static wastes behind her eyelids, the soundless brush of half a standard blink.

Jonas counts Alex's freckles.

He doesn't close his eyes.

—

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 _tbc_.


	5. coffee and flowers

—

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[ _but i was kinda spacin out_ ]

—

Jonas wakes up the next morning with the gold-white sunlight in his eyes and a headache pounding between his temples. His arm's gone numb where a weight has cut off the circulation, and his back is going to be cracking sickly for the next week.

Alex is still curled up on top of him with her face pressed into the crook of his throat, though, so Jonas can't say he's all that unhappy.

"Hey," he says. "Hey, Als, wake up."

"Don't wanna," Alex mutters, and buries his face further into Jonas' neck.

"I can't feel my arm," Jonas says placidly. "Not that I'm complaining, or anything."

"He complains," she grins up at him kind of sleepy. "'Cause you're super uncomfortable or whatever, right?"

"Or whatever," Jonas parrots in falsetto because he's twenty and he's still kind of a dick, running his free hand through her hair, an ocean to count the radio static. She makes a little noise like contentment. This should be weirder than it is. Or maybe it is weirder than it is, and it just doesn't feel like it because he's half the fuck asleep and hasn't had a cigarette in what feels like a lifetime. "I dunno if I'd call it uncomfortable, Als. but I seriously can't feel my arm."

"Loser," she pronounces.

But she does move her head.

(It's the little victories that he collects, ones like this especially. They don't mean anything, but he hoards them like diamonds shards. Ghosts, and haunted places, and his mother's grave. Alex snorting a laugh in the dark. Alex following him down a cliff-face. Alex moving her head, just because he asked. It's funny, the way the things that don't mean anything matter. How sometimes they matter more than anything else.)

Blood rushes back to the tips of his fingers in a tingle, the all-over prickle of oxygen-deprived flesh regaining awareness. Jonas flexes his hand, watches the play of sunlight across his skin, flexes again. "What d'you wanna do today?"

Alex is quiet for a minute, tipping her head back and forth, hums a little. "I—had a thought. Last night."

Jonas very determinedly does not think about last night. He's not ready to go there. Not yet. Maybe not ever. He's in no shape to play this game; hot and cold was never his style. "You? A thought? Are you sick?"

"Shut up, no one asked you."

"You did, though—"

Alex slaps a hand over his mouth, gives him a look highly reminiscent of a dead fish or maybe a frog. It's all mouth pinched flat, wide eyes, eyebrows raised three-quarters of the way up her face. In combination with the wild sticky-up strands of chemical-teal hair, for one whole minute, she could be any other teenage girl in the whole world just waking up.

It hurts, and so Jonas hacks, chokes on air, and bursts into laughing.

"Yeah, yeah, buddy, laugh it up," Alex says, both her hands over his face now, over the bright white flash of teeth in his mouth. "Just wait, you're coming with me."

"Wait, hold on, what," Jonas says. She's sitting on him, and he has no idea when that happened. His hands are curled at her hips. The fabric of her jeans is soft against his palms. "What are we doing."

"Okay, so, y'know—y'know how I haven't been—"

"Sleeping?" Jonas supplies. Neither of them need to hear  _having nightmares about normal people things_  this morning. It's too early for angst.

"Yeah, that," Alex just kind of nods, nose wrinkling. "Anyway, last night, I realized something."

"Why are you always having life-changing realizations at night?" Jonas asks, because he's honestly curious.

"When  _else_  am I gonna have 'em?" Alex just looks at him. "Are you gonna shut up and let me finish, or, like, what?"

That's a decent point, actually. Jonas crooks an eyebrow at her, doesn't say anything, just kind of jerks his head to tell her to go on. Nighttime realizations, through the fire and the flames, all to end up back here in the real world.

Mundanity is a hard pill to swallow, for girls like Alex.

Jonas gets that.

"So, the thing is, I? Am never going to be normal," Alex says. "Like, normal is beyond me, man, I'm not gonna be normal until I die."

"Okay," Jonas says. "So?"

"So I have to do  _something_ ," she says. Takes a slow, steadying breath. "I can't just sit around my parents' place for the rest of my life, that's not, like, it's not healthy? It's not healthy, it's not. But I can't keep waking up in a cold sweat every night, either, this was the first decent sleep I've had in like a week, and we're outside in the middle of a park."

"It's kind of amazing we didn't get robbed, actually," he muses, staring at the robin's egg morning sky, because yeah, actually, it kind of is.

"Exactly," Alex says, closes her eyes a little longer than a standard blink. "I gotta do something, Jonas, I can't just—I can't keep this up, y'know? I can't. I'm tired."

"Yeah, I know," Jonas says.

Because he does know. He does.

But still—

"What does this have to do with last night?" he asks, quiet.

"The only thing I'm good at is ghosts," Alex says. She shifts, cheek tucking closer into his chest. "That's what I realized last night. I'm good at ghosts, but nothing else."

"Hey, that's not the only thing you're good at," Jonas says. "You're good at making me pretty crazy, Als."

"Not the time, man."

Jonas laughs. "It's true, though."

"Whatever," she pokes him in the ribs, but he thinks he can hear her grinning. It's the way her voice catches at the end, just a tiny little upwards tick into a smile. He even manages to squash down the urge to squirm.

(He's ticklish all over. This is progress.)

"Not whatever," Jonas tells the sky.

" _Whatever_ ," Alex says again, with emphasis, but she's smiling now for sure. It's better, somehow. "Making you crazy doesn't make bank. It doesn't count."

"Yeah, fair," Jonas says. He chews on the next words, slow and deliberate. "Don't see how being good at ghosts makes bank, either, though."

"It doesn't," Alex says. "For normal people."

_But I'm not normal, and I'm never gonna be normal, and I don't_ wanna _be normal_  goes unsaid, but it hangs in the sunlit morning air around them like cut-out paper stars. The blue-domed sky, the silver-green grass. As above, so below.

Jonas dares to run his hand down her back. "So what's the plan?"

"We're in the Pacific Northwest, it's haunted by default," Alex says, and they both think of driving out to the ocean, last chance ghost diners and pancakes soaked in syrup. "I kinda want to fight a witch?"

"Jesus, Alex, do not," Jonas says, goes nearly breathless with the thought because she would, Alex absolutely would, she's fought ghosts and possession and the actual, literal space-time continuum and come out semi-triumphant. She'd fight a witch in a second. "Do not fight a witch."

"I could totally fight a witch."

"I'm not saying you couldn't," Jonas blinks at the sky. Why is this his life. "I'm saying what if you didn't, though."

"I mean, you're probably right," Alex says. "It might not be the greatest idea I've ever had."

"Naw, really?"

Alex squints up at him, eyes gone narrow. Jonas snickers and messes up her hair and she digs her knee into his thigh in retribution, grimacing when the morning dew slips down her collar cold.

"Worst," she mutters, uses his chest to leverage herself up. She kind of hovers above him for a minute, her hair an aquamarine curtain in the sunlight. "Do you wanna know what I wanna do, or not?"

"I do. Tell me."

Alex bites her lip. "I wanna go ghost hunting."

"What," says Jonas.

"Like, paranormal investigation! Finding cold spots! Being  _ghost hunters_! It's—I know it's probably not, like, the  _healthiest_  coping mechanism ever, but I—I think I could be good at it. I think  _we_  could good at it."

"We?" he asks.

"Who else is gonna keep me from fighting a witch?" Alex asks weakly, and it's in the pull of her face that Jonas finds himself already mentally agreeing to it. Someone needs to keep Alex out of trouble, or out of pain, or at the very least someone needs to mitigate all the things that could hurt her. Jesus, as though there's anything else that Jonas honestly wants to do! He's not cut out for school, and a juvy record hasn't likely endeared him to any of the craftsmen in town. Growing up is hard, but it's harder when you don't know where you fit, and it's hardest of all when you can't imagine anyone being willing to give you a chance. Jonas likes working with his hands, and he'd maybe be a good mechanic, but Camena isn't far enough away from North Valley for there not to have been some trickle-down-economics gossip.

They all know his mom is dead, and they all know he broke a kid's face.

That's not a super precedent, is Jonas' point.

And driving Alex around the country in the name of putting dead things back in the ground where they belong sounds… really good, actually. Really, really good.

(Not to mention all the other things that cross his mind: they don't need equipment, they don't need a home-base, they don't need anything, really, except his truck and gas and the wide long empty road. Alex talks to ghosts and Jonas talks to cars and they make a good team, already. They're good at picking up one another's slack, even in the darkest places, even in the darkest hours. When the world goes grey and unreal, Alex and Jonas know how to back each other up. That's a good thing, all on its' own.)

"Okay," he says. "One stipulation."

"How do you even know that word?"

"I read," Jonas says, dignified. He's not about to tell her that he learned it from her brother. That's weird. "You wanna hear it?"

"Shoot," says Alex.

"Turn twenty," Jonas says.

"Wow," Alex blinks at him, and she's snickering a little helplessly. God, twenty. "Unnecessary, much."

"That  _was_  your thing with the island, wasn't it? Turning twenty?"

"Yeah, I guess," she says, and she flops back down on top of him so that all the air goes out of his lungs in a rush and a quiet grunt of pain. Alex props her chin against his chest. "Will you teach me to drive stick?"

"Course," Jonas says, "if you want."

"I do," Alex says, quietly. Her mouth pulls, again, and Jonas waits because he knows, all of a sudden, that there's going to be something else. There always is. He doesn't want it any way else. "Hey, uh…"

"Yeah?"

"I—" Alex breaks off, closes her eyes. "I wanna say thanks."

"You don't need to."

"I do, though," she shakes her head, frantic, wild. "It's like—I do. 'Cause I'm gonna ask you to go into stupid-dangerous places, and we're probably gonna get possessed again, and we might—we might die, I dunno. Like, ghosts! We don't have a great track record, Jonas. So I just—"

Alex breaks off again. Exhales.

"Thank you," she says, again. "You don't gotta do this."

"I know," Jonas says. "I want to."

She doesn't ask why he's like this again, because Jonas thinks that maybe in that moment, Alex gets it. Maybe she gets why it's always here, for him. Maybe she gets why he'd follow her off a cliff, or down into the dark, or into the ever-after.

Alex presses her face into his throat and Jonas puts his arms around her.

If Alex is good at ghosts, then Jonas is good at Alex.

They're still just learning, that's all.

They don't speak for a long time, and that's okay, too.

"Hey, Alex?" Jonas says, at last. The sun's high in the sky, now, shadows down to noon's slim pickings. He's shed his jacket, has it stuffed underneath his head like a pillow, but the ground is still cool, and he keeps his eyes closed so that he's not half-blind.

"Mmhnm?"

"I think we should go back to the island."

—

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_tbc_.


	6. for all the silver girls

—

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[ _your shaking heart was torn to pieces_ ]

—

"You're bringing the radio?"

"Yeah," Alex says, fiddling with it.

It's eight o'clock in the evening, and Alex and Jonas are on the last ferry across the water. The sky's thick with cloud, and dark; no stars, tonight, and it's so quiet that they might be the last people in the universe. Salt on the breeze edged in the bitter burning of petroleum, Jonas watches the way Alex keeps her hands stuffed in her pockets with her fingers folded around the sharp edges of the radio, and aches with apology.

"Hey, Jonas…"

"Yeah?"

"Can you just—move your arm, garbage snowman, I'm cold," Alex says, and when Jonas does, she steps into the cave of his body, so small and fitting so perfectly. There's a faint tremble to her, and Jonas closes her into his chest.

"We don't gotta do this," Jonas says into her hair like a reminder.

Alex shakes her head, face buried right next to his heart. He's growing again, almost six-foot-two, now, and Alex is still just as short as she ever was. They're not quite adults, but they're a lot more capable than they were a year and a half ago. Same shit, different day.

"We do, though," Alex says. "I hate it, but you were right. We do gotta do it. We—gotta go back."

Jonas sighs. "I need to learn to keep my mouth shut."

"I mean, I'm not gonna argue with that," Alex says, but there's no bite to it.

Jonas is pretty sure they'd both be a lot happier if what is happening right now was not happening at all, ever, but then again, what does he know. He'd thought—it's just that there are stories, about only being able to move on when you've finally turned around and faced your fears, and Jonas had looked at Alex and thought—

_Maybe_ , he'd thought.  _Maybe_.

Edwards Islands looms out of the gloom, some giant nightmare monster with steel teeth. Here is Main Street, here is Epiphany Fields, here is the beach and the boathouse and the battleground that they'd only just barely survived. Here is Fort Milner. Here is the cave.

Here is Alex, and here is the radio.

Jonas tips his head down to look at her. Her eyes are fixed on the island like an oncoming storm, all of her sharp scattered edges suddenly pushed out of her skin for armour. She's got prickles all the way down her arms, gooseflesh blooming everywhere the night air touches her skin; Michael's jacket is tied tight around her waist, but Jonas just pulls her closer, and it seems like enough.

"Hey," he says, very gently. "Hey, it's going to be okay. You know that, right?"

"That's what I'm scared of," she says, and it's such a quiet confession.

The saves  _slop_  against the side of the ferry in perfect time, the ferry horn bellowing out to cut through the mist. They've got ten minutes, maybe less, and then they make landfall.

"Let's take a picture," Jonas says.

"What," Alex says.

"You heard me," he tells her, raises an eyebrow. They just look at each other for a minute, all the sea-salted cool blue air, the stillness of the world in the gathering dusk. Everything is in shitty soft-focus between them, the lights on the mainland twinkling like stars and fragments the further away they get. The ferry is very steady beneath their feet.

"If you are seriously asking me to take a picture right now, Jonas, I am literally going to murder you," Alex says. Her face is entirely devoid of emotion, just a flat clean slate of nothing.

For some bizarre, inexplicable reason, Jonas wants to laugh.

"C'mon," he says, instead. "Posterity."

"And I thought  _I_  was the one with issues," Alex says, sighs, and moves back just enough that both of their faces will be visible in the flash of Jonas' phone's camera. There's no reception on the island, but who goes anywhere without their phones, these days?

(Jonas learned his lesson the first time, is what he's saying.)

The picture is overexposed and too clear by far, nothing at all like Ren's old Polaroid softness, and Alex's best friend is missing from in-between them, but it's not a  _bad_  picture. Alex's mouth is half-open and Jonas himself is somehow way too close to the camera. He's not even sure how that happened.

"Gross," she pronounces. "Gimme that, you can't take a picture to save your life."

Which, yeah, that's fair. Jonas wordlessly hands her his phone, and isn't surprised at all when she taps in the passcode like it's second nature. Maybe it is; it's the date of his mom's death, and maybe that's not something that's really surprising.

"Hey, smile," Alex says.

Jonas grins.

The camera flashes again, and lights up the night.

—

Jonas shoves the dumpster up against the crude wire fence, sheet metal biting into his back. They haven't really spoken a word to one another since they disembarked and watched the ferry sail away, Captain Karen nothing but a pale shadow behind the thick glass. She'd not waved at them, but Jonas could feel her eyes boring holes into the back of his neck.

It's probably not often that she has to bring a couple of people out here when there's no senior party going on. It's probably even  _less_  often that it's a couple of people she's alreadybrought out here, especially when it's two of six that came back far more out of it than the rest.

Whatever else their cohort might have been, Jonas is pretty sure that Captain Karen had never dealt with a haunting, before.

He can't really blame the woman for staring.

But there's something sharp to the set of Alex's shoulders that's only gotten sharper, and they still don't speak as Jonas helps her up and then hoists himself over the fence.

They retrace every step, all going back to the start.

Alex waits for him to detangle himself from the fence, and then she reaches out to take his hand.

(So maybe it's a little bit less like that, then. Jonas isn't going to complain. Alex's palm is small and warm in his, scabs on her knuckles from when he was trying to teach her how to change a tire. It didn't work out great, but not a lot of things have. Holding her hand while they climb down a technical mountain isn't the worst place Jonas has been, not by a long shot, even if that self-same mountain was the start of all his problems in the first place. Or at least most of them, anyway—the mountain didn't make him punch some guy in the face. That was all Jonas, all alone. Whatever.)

The beach is deserted.

Sand glints under starlight and a cold moon, and both Alex and Jonas stare down to where the remnants of a campfire still sit, uneven-shaped rocks to keep the embers and the ash in place. They look like they haven't been lit in an aeon, nothing but scrips and scraps left over. No kindling to start a light.

Jonas wonders who's been here in the year that he and Alex haven't.

"What are you thinking about?" Jonas asks, at last.

"Truth or slap," Alex says, instantly. "I smacked Ren, once."

"I'm sorry, what."

"It was like the twelfth time I'd done it or something, and I was mad at everything and he was lying about liking Nona," she says, shrugs a little, but it doesn't hide the funny way her mouth curls up, strange and fond. "So I hit him. It made Clarissa laugh."

Jonas doesn't remember that, but he figures that he probably doesn't remember a lot of things.

He remembers Alex. It's enough.

"She would laugh," Jonas says, voice dry. He thinks about Clarissa standing out on Alex's parents' deck with a cigarette between her fingers, spiderkiller poison and smirking at Michael standing just out of sight. Jonas looks down at Alex, and is fervently glad he got the better end of the deal. "She's like that."

"Yeah, I know."

"…You ready for this, Als?"

"No," Alex says, shaking her head. She takes in a slow, deep breath, flexes her hands, cracks every single one of her knuckles with the irrational urge to snap her own fingers off. An external manifestation of an internal breaking, or at least the mime of it. She's got the look of a girl grimly about to go to her own death. "Let's go before I chicken out."

The rocks that had caved in after them have been cleared away, by luck or time or providence. Jonas ducks down, kicks some debris away. He'd followed an eerie green light down here, the first time, will'o'wisp siren's song that had sunk its claws deep into his brain-stem and he'd followed it because it had sounded like his mom.

It's gone now, though.

Jonas offers Alex a hand. "Watch your step."

Alex links their fingers, but she lets him lead.

It's weird, leading, Jonas thinks. He's spent the last hundred lifetimes following Alex around, and to have it flipped, now, when they've gone back to the start, it's—jarring. The tunnel's ceiling is low and the path is rocky, but there's muscle memory to every step. Déjà vu slides over Jonas like water in a stream.

He's been here a hundred thousand times.

"Jesus, this is weird," Jonas breathes aloud, blinking and shaking his head to clear himself of the memory cling. "How did I never notice this?"

"You're telling me," Alex laughs, more wind than sound. "Normally by this point I'm shouting at you for ditching me."

"Yeah, well, normally I probably deserve it," Jonas mutters.

They skid down the last few feet, a rainfall of pebbles that skitters off into the dark, and the maw of the cavern opens around them. Alex's fingernails dig into Jonas' wrist. There's no light, no light, and so Jonas flicks his phone on. He glances down at Alex, the sudden brilliant wash of white light blinding.

Alex has her radio held tight in her fist.

Jonas has a moment of profound realization:

Alex has been waiting a  _very_  long time, for this. She just needed someone to push her into going, someone to talk her through the fear. And it couldn't have been Michael or Nona, and it couldn't have been Ren, because not one of them remembers what it was like to be dead. It might have been Clarissa, but Clarissa's got enough problems. Jonas keeps his shoulders up, moves a little to the side, and allows Alex to take the last few trembling steps on her own.

And so she does.

"Hey, guys," Alex calls out into the dark. The cavern echoes weirdly, the sound of dripping water magnified back a hundred thousand times over. "I'm back."

There's no reply.

"Is anyone there?"

And still, nothing.

"You might wanna try that thing you're holding," Jonas says, quietly.

Alex looks back at him, twisting a little. The cave's lake is perfectly still, not even ripples marring its mirrored surface. She's very small in front of it, the crane of her neck an impossible thing in the gloom. Even in the light of his phone, the shadows slip across her shoulders and settle in her empty places.

If the Kanaloa ghosts still exist, Jonas thinks they're probably curled up around Alex right now, all their bright cherry-colour eyes glowing, all their hollow shadow-fingers winding into her hair.

But no one's laughing, and when Alex finally turns the dial, there's nothing over the frequencies except static.

Jonas holds his breath.

"C'mon," Alex whispers. Jonas thinks she doesn't even realize she's saying it. "C'mon, if you're out there, talk to me. You never had a problem with it before, and I can hear everyone else, anyway, so c'mon—"

She spins the dial and spins the dial.

Nothing.

Spins the dial some more.

And still, nothing.

Nothing at all.

"Oh," Alex says, and it echoes.

"Alex?" Jonas asks. "What's—are you—?"

"They're… gone," Alex breathes. She turns to look up at him, the sandy ground beneath her feet smudging up in footprints and god, she's pretty, all wide dark eyes and long lashes and teal hair, brown skin and cold hands, the smile breaking out across her face so real that it hurts. She's the prettiest girl Jonas has ever seen, even down here in the dank and the dark.  _Especially_  down here in the dank and the dark. "Jonas, they're gone! I can't hear them! They're really gone!"

"Yeah," Jonas says, grinning. He catches her up and she launches herself at him, hands around her face, suddenly so close they're breathing the same air. There are no tears in the world left, here. "Yeah, they are. What d'you wanna do now?"

Alex grins. "Let's get out of here."

—

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.

_tbc_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _disconnect_ — marina and the diamonds  & clean bandit.
> 
> i hate being sick.


	7. wanna believe everything you believe

—

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.

.

[ _i promise darling i'll still love you then_ ]

—

It's going to storm.

That's all Jonas can think, once he and Alex manage to climb out of the cave's mouth, mostly whole and in once piece. Alex wanted to go for a walk—and Jesus, it's not like Jonas is about to say  _no_  to something so easily granted, not tonight—but given how thick the sky is with clouds, he doesn't think they're going to get very far. There are no stars, and almost as little light as there was down in the dark of the cave.

If Jonas wasn't sure that Alex would have a panic attack, he'd suggest that maybe they ought to camp down under the cliff overhand for shelter.

The  _last_  thing he wants, tonight, is to get caught out in the rain.

"What did your mom say?" Alex's voice is very soft.

"Huh?"

"When—y'know at the end, before the blast door, there were those—"

"Record decks," Jonas supplies, remembering.

"You don't gotta tell me," Alex says, brushing her bangs out of her eyes. She's a stubborn starlight thing, the only compass Jonas cares to know, and he glances at her to find her mouth pinched up with frustration. "God, why are words so hard, why can't I get this  _right_ —"

"Slow down, Als," Jonas says, easy as anything.

Alex exhales slowly through her nose. "I—told you, right? About Michael?"

About Michael, about Michael's room, about the attic and the dead boy and the drowning. Jonas looks down at the top of Alex's head, shadows and waves, teal and soft, and thinks that he'd be willing to do it all over again, if it made her smile. His ghost girl, always going back to the start.

"Yeah," Jonas says. "You told me."

"I didn't, though," she shakes her head. "Not everything."

"You're never gonna be able to tell me everything," Jonas says, and maybe that's exactly what she needed to hear, because her shoulders go down and all the knotted-up cords of her shoulders go loose. Alex leans her head against him, closes her eyes for a second longer than a standard blink.

"Okay, I'm trying this again. What did you talk about with your mom, before the blast door?" Alex finally gathers herself enough to ask.

"Does this have to do with Michael? Or the ghosts?"

"Both, I guess."

"It's… hard to explain," Jonas says. He's never been very good at words, either, and he understands her irritation with their limits. The only way he can tell her is with the right words, and he doesn't well know if he has them.

"Try, garbage snow."

"You know," Jonas says, mildly, "if I was someone else, I'd consider that really insulting. C'mon, can't you call me something… not that?"

"You  _are_  a garbage snowman, though," Alex says. "And I wouldn't call anyone else that, anyway. I only need one garbage snowman, and they wouldn't get it."

_They wouldn't get a lot of things_ , Alex doesn't say, but Jonas knows that already.

He stuffs his hands in the pockets of his jacket, old worn leather squeaking beneath his fists. He kind of wishes he'd worn his beanie, but maybe that would have been too much like déjà vu. Jonas tips his head back to stare up at the sky, that endless cloud-thick dark, and decides to try.

"It was a… memory, I guess? We were in the hospital," he says, voice halting. The edges of it still sting. "She was sick for a long time, Als."

Alex looks up at him with wide brown eyes, dark-fringed lashes, freckles winking across her nose. God, she's the prettiest girl he's ever seen, and here in the mottled-bruise purple-black night, he loves her like a knife between the ribs, all of its sharp jagged edges, all of that vital bleeding pain. He loves her like a blunt object to the back of the head, like cigarette burn in the lungs, like flames and smoke. Like every single thing he's ever held dear.

Jonas dares to drape an arm around her shoulders. The night turns deep blue around them, and Alex shuffles in closer to his side.

"How long?" she asks.

"I was fourteen when the doctors found the tumours," Jonas says. Four years of illness blooms between them. Four long, painful years of watching the colour drain from his mother's cheeks, of weight and beautiful auburn curls falling away beneath chemotherapy, of his parents talking late into the night and knowing, always  _knowing_ , that the chances of her ever coming home were getting slimmer by the day. And the last days, when she was so thin and hurting so much that she wasn't even his mom anymore, just some worn-out wraith in the hospital bed with a tube in her nose because she couldn't hardly breathe—

(His mother's smile, slipping away like dry sand through an hourglass.)

And Jesus, then she'd died, and everything inside of Jonas had frozen over, cracked and shattered and finally breaking into his fist in some kid's face, blood on his knuckle, the way his dad hadn't been able to look at him. Still can't look at him, some days, because Jonas has her eyes and her bitter-herb dry humour, and there are some hurts that don't go away.

Jonas isn't prone to poetry, but this isn't about just anyone.

"I'm sorry," Alex says.

"Nah, don't be," Jonas murmurs, and he knows he's not apologizing because his mother is dead. He thinks about the record decks, spinning and spinning and he'd fallen into it like a whirlpool, sucked down and spit out dazed and dizzy into the memory.

It had been sunny, sitting in his mother's hospital room. The blinds had been thrown wide.

That's how Jonas had known that it had only been a dream.

His mom had looked healthy, and she'd been grinning the way she used to, all sharp edges around the white of a cigarette. They talked about things, they must have, but Jonas can't remember any of them, now. Maybe they weren't important in the first place; in that sunlight-ghost hospital room, his mother had looked like she was at peace, and that's all Jonas cares about, honestly.

And he's not going to lie to Alex about something like this. This isn't the hill he's going to die on.

"I don't really remember," he says, just as the faint sound of thunder begins roll overhead. "Not—it wasn't talking, exactly? Or, I dunno, maybe it was, but I don't remember it. We were just sitting together."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. She looked—healthy. I never thought I'd see her like that again," Jonas exhales. It feels like breathing broken glass, all of the sharp edges cutting into his windpipe. "She was smiling, Als. I thought I'd forgotten what she looked like when she smiled."

"I guess they weren't always horrible?"

"Who?"

"The ghosts."

"Nah, they were pretty horrible," Jonas says, considering, and Alex laughs kind of weird and shaky, a thready sound made up of stops and starts. He thinks of her hands at that stupid party, the soft-focus dexterity, and the sharp hot  _want_  that had simmered beneath his skin. Jonas is pretty sure he shouldn't be thinking about that right now, but here he is, that's what's happening. "What's it gotta do with your brother?"

"Nothing," Alex says. "Everything. He should be dead and he's not. Like, the whole possession thing? Not awesome. But—Jesus, I can't believe I'm still talking about this. I should not still be talking about this! It's been like a year!"

"Yeah, so?"

"Why the hell do you like me so much?! I'm crazy, Jonas!"

"I just do! Why does it matter—" Jonas starts, but halfway into it, a crack of lightning snaps across the sky. Purple and white, bleaching them both out to unreality.

Oh.

Jonas looks up.

A raindrop splats cold on his face.

"Aw, come  _on_ ," Alex breathes. She's looking up, too. It's the pair of them with hands entwined, staring up at the black dome of the universe, united against the world. Jonas following Alex and Alex following Jonas, and even when they're fighting, they move like magnets. He'd known it was going to storm, could taste the ozone before thunder in the air, and now—

Now, the sky cracks open, and it suddenly begins to pour.

—

" _Fuck_  this place," Jonas says, with feeling.

He drags Alex into the lee of one of the buildings on Main Street, out of the wind and the rain because it  _is_  raining, raining hard, and there's water dripping down his collar. Alex has got her hands wound into his shirt, tugging him out of the cracks and crevices into the fury of the storm.

"C'mere," she says, "c'mere, c'mere!"

"Alex," Jonas laughs, "Alex, what are you doing, we're already soaked."

"Shh, don't ruin this, we're having a moment," she says, and it's so close, so warm, and Jonas is snickering into Alex's hair because only Alex, honestly only Alex would be this interested in kissing in the rain on an unhaunted island where they'd died nearly a hundred times. She bites his lip, bruised and bloody, all the old forgotten horrors of the world slipping quiet away.

"We're gonna get sick," Jonas says into her mouth. The meagre flare of her hips is heady beneath his palms. "I swear to God, we're gonna get sick. Your mom is gonna yell—"

"I dreamed this," Alex says. She tips her face up to look at him with eyes swallowed up entire by pupil, mirror-black, and the hungry shadow-ghosts in them take Jonas' breath away. "Maybe I dreamed it all up."

"Dreamed what?" he asks absently, distracted by the way her fingers creep under the hem of his shirt. "Jesus, your fingers are like ice."

Alex laughs. "God, you really never change, do you?"

"No, not really," Jonas says. He pushes her dripping hair out of her face, and thinks that it's frightening, how much he needs her to be alright. It's frightening, what he thinks he might be willing to do to make sure that she  _stays_  alright. He curls his hands around her face. "You okay?"

Alex closes her eyes, shivering. "Yeah," she says, "yeah, I'm alright. I'm cool. We're cool."

Jonas doesn't ask her about the dreaming. She'll come to it in her own time, after the sun's come up and the rain clouds have all gone away, when they're both not soaked and cold to the bone. She'll get to it when she gets to it. When they're home and chilled out, when they're not on Edwards Island, when she's ready to talk about it. Jonas isn't worried; he's not about to force it.

This is Alex, after all.

She gets it.

—

"Okay, how fucking weird is this. We're getting back  _on_  the ferry?"

"Yeah? How else would we get home?"

"I dunno, man, I've never done this part before!"

False dawn streaks pale rose and silver along the horizon. Jonas and Alex wait on the ferry's deck, sharing his jacket like a blanket because leather absorbs less water than fabric does. He's comparatively dry, but with Alex weaseled around him the way she is,  _comparatively_  doesn't help much. Jesus, it's goddamn cold. Next time they do this, he's bringing a tent.

"What do you mean?" Jonas blinks down at her.

Alex props her chin against his chest, neck craned. "Usually when we do this, I wake up already on the boat? So like, actually  _boarding_? It's a trip."

"Why did you have to make that pun. But Jesus, seriously?"

"Yeah."

"Wow," Jonas says, because of all the things Alex has ever told him about the ghosts, this might be the weirdest because of how  _mundane_  it is. "I don't know what to say."

"Yeah," Alex says. She wrinkles her face up. "Why didn't anyone tell me how much waiting for the ferry sucked?"

"You complained about it last time, too," Jonas says, and he thinks that yeah, he might not change between the worlds, maybe he's rock-steady and solid, but Alex has her moments. She  _would_  complain about the waiting.

"Bug off, I did not!"

"You did, though," Jonas snickers into her hair. "Every single time."

"There is no way you remember that, don't front with me," Alex sniffs up at him. "There's like, absolutely no way, that's not a thing."

"It's a thing, Als," Jonas says.

"Worst," Alex pronounces. She burrows deeper into his jacket, and her voice comes muffled. "So are we, like, doing this? Ghost-hunting, or whatever? You actually wanna do this with me?"

The ferry's horn bellows out over the water, cutting any answer he might have had off. Captain Karen is a faint shadow behind the glass, but Jonas is pretty sure that's her way of saying  _no funny business on my ship_.

So he doesn't answer, not right away.

Land, ho.

Jonas shuffles Alex off the ferry, the pair of them stumbling with exhaustion. It takes a while, but eventually, he manages to pour Alex into his truck. He's freezing and wet and tired but he's gentle, careful, and the sunrise creeps along the horizon to bring the morning along. Edwards Island fades away behind them like it had never been there at all, and Alex smiles up at him from the passenger seat, half-loopy, her hair plastered down to her skull, so cold she's not shivering anymore. It's not cute, and it can't be healthy. She looks like a tweaked-out chipmunk.

"Jonas?" Alex says.

"Yeah?"

"Are we?"

(What the hell, Jonas loves her.)

He kisses the top of her head.

"Yeah," Jonas says. "Yeah, Als, I think we are."

—

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_fin_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> notes: it's been a wild fucking six months, my dudes. thanks for sticking around.  
> notes2: _scary love_ — the neighbourhood.  
>  notes3: yeah, there's still like. two more whole fics i have planned. that's a thing. anyway. i'm gonna go finish _the gay and wonderous life of caleb gallo_ , if anyone wants to join me.

**Author's Note:**

> jonas is so much more difficult to write than alex is. boo.


End file.
